This article contributes to our empirical understanding of self-respect in risingmeritocracies by focusing on the experiences of unemployed, low-skilled people recruited as workfare volunteers in the Netherlands. As many theorists have argued, the longterm unemployed struggle to maintain self-esteem. We found that workfare projects that introduce them to voluntary work can help them regain self-respect through four types of emotional labour: feeling respected through their newfound status, enjoying a craft, being able to perform in less stressful working environments, and taking pride in the meaning bestowed by voluntary work. But the emotional labour necessary to experience their situation more positively also increases the risk of experiencing negative emotions, thereby posing new threats to the fragile self-respect of unemployed citizens.
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As a practitioner, a manager and a scientist in social work for 40 years, I am still intrigued by the social work positioning and legitimating processes. Its recognition by users and financiers is often diffuse and its fragmentation sometimes hinders effective interventions. In social work itself, we see a range of positioning processes, most of them either legitimating social work as a promoter of social justice, a supporter of emancipation and anti-oppressive practice, or positioning social work as a therapeutic approach, treating people with socio-psychological and psychiatric disorders. Social work is often promoted as a ‘real’ profession, in need of formal recognition and in need of a precise profile. In this article it will be argued that the core of social work is about supporting people in their social functioning and should position itself in the centre of the post-modern quest: the social-psychological disorientation, the lack of meaning, and the problems of isolation and exclusion. Modern professionalism is not about demarcating and regulating but much more about ‘Entgrenzung’ and openness.
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Dutch citizens on welfare have to volunteer at Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) in return for their benefits. Through applying the ‘worlds of justification’ of Boltanski and Thévenot, this article aims to provide a better theoretical and empirical understanding of social justice of policies that obligate welfare clients to participate in CSOs. The analysis of 51 in-depth interviews with Dutch welfare recipients shows that respondents perceive these policies partly but not unilaterally as unfair. If respondents perceive welfare as ‘free money’ and if they are convinced that civic behavior demands interventions against free riding on welfare resources, ‘mandatory volunteering’ is considered as fair. Our main contribution is to the theoretical debate on recognition and redistribution by showing empirically how ‘othering’ plays an important role in determining when mandatory volunteering becomes a matter of redistribution or recognition.
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